HOQU – The decentralized affiliate platform

HOQU is the first decentralized affiliate platform that will definitely eliminate fraud and can save advertisers a lot of money, give trust to affiliates and open new markets.

HOQU’s Background

In total, HOQU has been working for more than ten years in marketing, and more than four years in affiliate marketing. They are aware of the problems in affiliate marketing. The main problem in the affiliate branch is the lack of trust between the parties. For example, websites which use dubious schemes to obtain customers’ personal data and to pass them off to the advertiser. On the other hand, it often happens that a lead gets rejected so the affiliate doesn’t get a share of the sale. Or, the publisher modifies the affiliate code so not all leads are recorded on the affiliate system. All these problems have led to serious trust issues between the advertiser and the affiliate.

Token Sale and Usage

HOQU saw huge potential in the use of blockchain and smart contracts in combination with building a platform to bring affiliates and advertisers together. Through their eyes, a token sale is just a method of doing it faster and more extensively.

The HQX token is a key component in the economy of the HOQU project. The token can be used for:
– Payments for services by advertisers
– Payments from affiliate networks
– Payments from advertisers to affiliates

Major Competitors

According to the HOQU team, they don’t see any real competitors within the blockchain community. All companies who make projects at affiliate or performance marketing are developing traditional services, for example just affiliate networks or lead generation services. HOQU tries to bring a whole network infrastructure – a platform, where all of these (traditional) companies can interact.

We asked HOQU if they see AdEx as a competitor in some way, the team responded: “No, Adex is not our competitor. Adex works on a different model, selling clicks and views. On the HOQU platform, the advertiser pays only for real results of sales, qualified calls, installs, leads or revenue shares instead of traditional advertising models when you don’t have any guarantee that you will receive sales if you buy clicks.”

Team Formation and Culture

The founders of HOQU have been working together since university and they have opened more than 10 successful businesses. At the moment of writing, they employ more than 250 people in these businesses. They have a creative and open atmosphere.

Recent projects HOQU worked on are MarketCall and LeadsUp, which have shown the interest of the audience. Now they are trying to bring this experience to the blockchain.

The Challenge of HOQU

They don’t see the token sale as a big challenge. The big challenge for them is the chance to change the world of marketing. Connecting all these (traditional) companies to the platform will take some time and effort. Besides that, they will have to educate these companies to understand the value of blockchain and why they would want to use a token on the platform.

HOQU platform

A smart anti-fraud system developed as part of the advertiser’s decentralized application will not allow affiliates to engage in fraudulent activities. The system uses more than 50 different metrics in combination with neural networks and machine learning. At the moment, they have a concept model based on neural networks using the Google TensorFlow library. In general, this model accepts input parameters of the lead entity and performs scoring.

Other interesting tools:
– HOQU Automation Tools: Automation tool for creating templates for promo materials or developing an operating strategy for affiliate programs.
– HOQU Plugins Development: Allows companies to develop custom plug-ins to be made available to affiliates.

HOQU’s Roadmap

– January 2018: Development of smart contracts for all payment types (CPA, CPC)
– February 2018: Develop trackers for those payment types
– March 2018: Release of the first decentralized version of the platform
– September 2018: Launch of the first decentralized affiliate network on the HOQU platform
– March 2019: Developer Tool Kit (SDK) release

HOQU’s Future

“I hope that we will be able to do more work and exceed our business plans. But I think that HOQU is going to work for a minimum of 5 world markets, including the US, China, Europe and India. The total turnover will be in the billions of dollars and the market share will be about 10-15%”, according to the HOQU team.

Pros

The platform enables (traditional) companies to register on the platform and to offer their services. Payments will happen with the platform token HQX. If they manage to develop a properly working smart anti-fraud system, HOQU will be able to resolve the trust issues between advertisers and affiliates. The system should be able to detect most fraudulent activities and operate in a decentralized way, without any controlling entity. This means that advertisers won’t be able to reject leads or modify the affiliate code. Besides that, the commissions will drop to barely 0.5% per transaction.

Cons

The HOQU team told us: “The total knowledge of blockchain technologies of our audience is the biggest challenge we are facing. The other hardships are basic disadvantages of the blockchain itself. It is slow transaction processing, gas price and the impossibility of storing large data structures in the blockchain, like records of phone calls.”

In the whitepaper they describe the potential risk of cyberattacks on the platform which will have a negative impact on the operating costs, reputation, tools, and customers’ personal data.

In Conclusion

In our opinion, the smart anti-fraud system will be crucial for the platform to succeed. If this doesn’t work as expected, the well-known trust issues between advertisers and affiliates will remain. On the other hand, blockchain enables the affiliate marketing industry to cut the cost per transaction to only 0.5%, which is a significant decrease. The adoption of the platform will be key, but more importantly, educating all these companies to use blockchain technology and tokens will require a lot of time.

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